Our 3 day adventure across the Bolivian Salt Flats and desert

I woke around 8am. Breakfast was waffles and fruit – surprisingly delicious for this little small town, no stale bread in sight.

We met two red Land Cruisers with roofracks outside the hotel at 10.30am. There had been the option to do a short walking tour of Uyuni, but Susie and I needed the extra hour to squeeze all our possessions into our backpacks, leaving just a light day pack.
All the bags were thrown up on top of the car and wrapped in tarpaulines.
We set out to our first stop, the train graveyard just outside Uyuni. This was a pile of old rusted steamtrains that used to transport goods from Bolivia’s coast. We took some photos, surprised at the amount of tourists there.

The second stop was futher away on the edge of the salt flats. It was a small town absolutely packed with tourist shops selling warm clothes. Again, there were dozens of jeeps parked up. We met a man who showed us how they process salt in ovens and with iodine. A small girl no older than 5 took our payments for a local toilet.

The next stop was the salt flats themselves. As we drove, you could see optical illusions causing the edges of the distant Andes to shimmer and lift off the ground. Salt hovered seemingly above the horizon and perspective played tricks on your eyes – was that a post, person, car or building in the distance?

The edges had pools of water refecting the colours of the sky. We stopped at a cafe and had llama steaks and salad for lunch. There were the most horrific toilets. And there were loads of flags supposedly representing every country, but New Zealand or Australia wasn’t there.

We bounced across the salt for another 45 minutes until just the white salt, blue sky and distant mountains were the onyl things we could see. We played around trying out perspective photos – it was a lot harder than it looks! The salt was pure here and had crystalised in hexagons on the ground, stretching as far as you could see.

Our next stop was ‘fish island’, a dark mountain that rose out of nowhere! Because these flats used to be the sea, the entire island was made of coral. It was the strangest thing to find in the middle of the desert! It was also covered in 2 metre high cactus plants. We walked up the coral for 20 minutes (it was a high mountain but would’ve once been completely submerged) to more amazing views of the salt flats.

Our last stop was to see the sunset, but the temperature had dropped so much we hardly wanted to get out the car. I had been wearing two woolen jumpers and a puffer jacket all day, but it was now too cold for even those!

We arrived at our hostel, a strange cold and empty building made of salt in the middle of the desert. Susie and my room had no windows and horrible orange bedspreads like a prison. There was a central room that looked into the toilets, which had no paper or soap. We sat in that room waiting for dinner to be served – vegetable soup (I had three helpings), chicken that was so hard to chew and chips. It was served around 9pm at night. Not the most glamorous lodgings, but definitely an adventure!


We woke up nice and early to start the next day of our tour. Breakfast was exceptionally stale bread, so I ate some scrambled eggs wrapped in cheese with a coffee. It was absolutely freezing outside. A big pregnant Labrador wagged her tail as we packed up the jeeps.

I was feeling much better that morning but the drive was a long one, I had to ask Neil and Elvis to pull the car over to use the Inca toilet during a lenghty conversation about faulty towers. I didn’t care about what the others thought – I was desperate! Our first stop was some train tracks in the middle of the desert, followed by a smoking semi active volcano. The lava had formed strange orange rock formations, not like any I’d seen before, in the middle of the desert. We took some photos and used the exceptionally nice toilets.

Next we saw two flamingo lakes! At the first one the birds were further away, at the second we could get much closer. It was very cool seeing them in the wild, in such a cold location! The lakes were partially frozen over. We had lunch there in a little adobe building. I didn’t eat much but as soon as I did, the nausea returned. Tessa was very unwell and she shared some of her ginger tablets with me.

On our way to the next lagoon and the ‘stone trees’ we saw a little fox on the road. It crept up to the car and stared at us, making us wind the windows up! I think it probably wanted food. Then we saw the pink lake, Laguna Colorado. Because of the wind it looked exceptionally red!

Then we went off to our hostel. It was freezing now and the sun was setting over the desert and mountains. We pulled into what looked like abandoned buildings. When Richella asked what the holes in the ground were for, Neil said the government were excavating a mass grave. He was joking but we believed him because our surroundings supported the story. There was one sign saying ‘bar’.

I didn’t eat dinner, just some cup noodles I bought from a shop in one of the empty-looking buildings. Our bedroom (five of us sharing) had concrete beds, concrete floor and it was absolutely freezing. The toilets were down the corridor, naturally they were BYO soap and paper.


I had just got into bed after a conversation with a girl on the tour who was a doctor, when Neil came into our room and said we had to see the stars, he’d never seen them like this before. I got up again and it was true, the sky was ink black making each star look huge. The entire milky way and some of the planets were visible. It was very nice! By this time I had a fever and my face and hands were burning hot despite the cold. I slept through the night, only waking once for a very cold bathroom trip.

We packed back into the car the next morning. I had half a cup of coffee and one pikelet. Since most of us had slept in our clothes, there was no need to get changed. There definitely weren’t any showers, and because the pipes had frozen overnight, the bathroom had flooded with visible sewerage. It was pretty grim.

Our first stop of the morning were some very active geysers. We walked around them, absolutely no safety ropes in sight. Our guide said someone died two years ago by falling into one when taking a photo, after he made us walk over a 20cm wide ice/dirt walkway about a metre above two pools of boiling water on either side. The sunrise mixed with all the steam made the area look like a movie set. Then we went to some natural outdoor hotpools!

The second quick stop was Laguna Verde at 5000m above sea level. It wasn’t green that day! We drove on to the Bolivian border and said goodbye to the other people in the group. We exited Bolivia, and Chile had paved a highway right up to the border.
We drove on this exceptionally smooth road for about 5 minutes then waited an hour at the border for our bags to be searched. Apparently a lot of drugs go through this particular crossing.

After that, it was one straight road down several thousand metres to San Pedro de Atacama.